Why building site scaffolding is tricky and how Drush Make can save you time

Description

Collection: Change Management and Version ControlChapter: How to Configure Drush and use Drush Make

Transcript

In order to understand the usefulness of the Drush Make utility, we need to take a look at the ways that we typically create a Drupal site codebase. Now, this is before we actually start working with the database or install the Drupal site. This is the gathering of all of the code before we hit that install button.

So the first method is to copy an existing Drupal site and clean it up, removing anything that's specific to the original project where that codebase is from and then reusing it on a new site. Now, some problems with this are one, you might accidently leave some stuff behind. For example, the name of the company that you previously did work for or some custom code that you really don't need on the new project.

Secondly, as you're cleaning up the code, you might actually remove something that's pretty important to the new project inadvertently and because you're copying an entire codebase, it's pretty likely that you'll need to update some modules or Drupal Core in order to bring everything up to date. And finally, this process is pretty time consuming. In order to make sure that everything is clean, you have to be pretty critical about the code that's inside of the Drupal site and make sure that you're getting everything out of there that needs to be out of there.

A second method is downloading everything from scratch so downloading the latest version of Drupal Core, downloading all of the themes and modules that you'll need in order to build the codebase in any libraries that you need as well. Now, this is even more time consuming. Downloading all of those pieces and making sure you get every bit that would normal ...

In this series we uncover how to use powerful tools to speed up and stabilize the Drupal development process. We begin with a thorough walk-through of Git, the version control system. After we cover how to patch modules and upgrade Drupal from one minor version to another, we demonstrate how to use the Features module to version control components of Drupal that aren't typically available to version control. Finally, we wrap up with how to integrate Drush - a powerful command line tool for Drupal - into your workflow to speed up the process of doing everything we discussed earlier in the series.

Some of the key points we'll be covering include:

How to use the command line

How to work with the Features module to capture important database changes and make deployment easier.

How to use Git for version control

Best practices for working on a Drupal team

Who this collection is for

This video collection is mainly for developers who want to improve their deployment strategies and learn how to work on a shared Drupal code base with other developers. However, even if you are not a developer, our coverage of using Features and version control is extremely valuable for deploying Drupal sites and sharing reusable components between projects.

Prerequisites

Even if you are not a developer, you will be able to follow with most of this collection. When we talk about code we do not go into detail about the basic components of the code, so you may want to brush up on some coding basics in the "PHP Programming Basics" collection.

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